On 2014-04-08 00:31, Fernando Frediani wrote: > Reading all this discussion around WRT1900ac makes me wonder of something: > > - When Belkin acquired Linksys and announced WRT1900ac they made a big > noise (marketing) about "OpenWRT compatibility" so they are using the > project's name for their financial benefit, make people believe in that > to buy the hardware (nothing that stops them to do that really). > - Anyone here would then expect they engage with developers and submit > patches for the work they are doing. They kind of showed up but very > briefly and submmited a non-acceptable patch so far. > - Therefore they are subscribed to this email list seeing all this > discussion around their product and either: > - They watch it silently, laugh and ignore it (which is not good). > - They are not even aware or following this discussion (which is > not good too). > > Therefore I get confused of what the next steps will be around it and > the output of this discussion will end. The code quality issues in the patches are fixable. The biggest problem with this is the fact that right now, the wifi chip (from Marvell) needs a proprietary driver to run. The submitted patches only include a prebuilt .ko for this driver. The response I got from Belkin indicates that they didn't realize that this was going to be a problem and they are now trying to fix it.
I've seen this happen to other open source related projects using Marvell hardware as well, so the big question is whether Belkin can put enough pressure on them to get the source code released. Even if that happens, the source code will most likely need a rewrite or an insane amount of cleanup, as is typical for proprietary wifi drivers in the embedded space. There are many signs that if released, the source code to this driver is going to be horrible: weird function names, big module size, use of custom vendor-specific hostapd and wpa_supplicant drivers. This is most likely going to take a long time to resolve. A lot of this mess could have been avoided, if Belkin had talked to the developer community before finalizing the hardware specs. However, this is a lesson that a lot of companies trying to get into the open source market will have to learn the hard way. I'm assuming that the intentions behind creating this device were good, but given the uncertain nature of the wifi driver issue, I would not recommend buying any WRT1900AC devices until we have an open source wifi driver for it. - Felix _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
